The Last Battle

[sawyl]

I was a little bit apprehensive about The Last Battle, which seems to me to be the most problematic of the Narnia novels. It's by far the most violent, parts of the plot feel arbitrary, the treatment of the Calormenes is difficult — although at least one of them is shown in a positive light — there is the Problem of Susan, while less said about the ending the better. But despite all that, there's only one way to go: farther up and farther in!

When Shift the Ape spots the skin of a dead lion floating in Cauldron Pool, he comes up with a cunning plan: by dressing his dim sidekick Puzzle the Donkey up, he can pretend that Aslan has returned and by doing so, he can rule Narnia. When King Tirian hears that Aslan has enslaved his people and is chopping down the living trees, he flies into a rage and attacks the Calormene merchant overseeing a group of enslaved talking horses. Wretched with guilt, Tirian and his friend Jewel the Unicorn surrender to the Narnians surrounding Shift and the stable where he keeps his fake Aslan, only to be tied to a tree for their troubles. After a strange dream in which Tirian sees himself appearing like a ghost in a room where seven strangely dressed people, including High King Peter, are assembled for dinner. Waking, Tirian finds that he has been sent help in the form of two children: Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole.

My problems start on page one with Shift's plot to sell his fellow Narnians a fake Aslan. His scheme seems far too easy and too pat — the country seems to fall apart in no time at all — but I suspect that's because Lewis is trying to make a point about the weakness of a dogmatic beliefs in symbols that doesn't have any overlap with my worldview. Tirian's rashness in the opening feels contrived — he doesn't seem to behave in the same fashion later on — although his preference for loafing about and hunting may explain why it takes so little to bring his kingdom down about his ears.

After retreating to a small tower to resupply, the King, the unicorn, and the children decide to learn more about the stable and Shift's lion, which he now insists is called Tashlan, combining the aspects of Aslan and the Calormene god Tash into a single being. During the raid, Jill rescues Puzzle the Donkey, causing Tirian to believe that he has unequivocal proof that the ape's Aslan is phoney. But when he tries to convince a group of passing dwarfs, Tirian discovers that when they stopped believing in the Shift's Aslan, they — with the noble exception of a dwarf called Poggin — stopped believing in any Aslan.

In the end, Tirian and company resort to a direct assault on the stable, only for the situation to become confused when the real Tash appears to claim his Calormenes, the King discovers that the stable appears to contain an entire other world, and the remaining nobles of Narnia — Digory, Polly, Peter, Edmund, Lucy but very definitely not Susan, who has given the whole thing up as a childish game — appear in the company of Aslan who ends the world, dividing its creatures and peoples into the just and unjust. The whole thing ends with all the characters running off into Aslan's country, eventually arriving at the walled garden of The Magician's Nephew where they are greeted by Reepicheep the Mouse and by the news from Aslan and that the term is over, the holidays have begun, and they will never have to leave again.

The obvious Christian symbolism of the stable — as Lucy says when talking about the size, "IN our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world" — is actually secondary to its role as some sort of Platonic heaven. As Digory Kirke obligingly notes, like Plato's Simile of the Cave, the real world outside the stable is merely the shadow of the real world within and the only reason we don't realise this is because we've never seen things in the true light of the sun.

The ending of the series problematic on so many levels, it's hard to know where to start.

Firstly, there's the problem of finishing a series by killing off all your characters. Secondly there's the peculiar vision of heaven that doesn't seem remotely coherent, whether you buy into the Christian message or not. Thirdly, there is Lewis' casual dismissal of Susan Pevensie for wanting to be grown-up — as Neil Gaiman points out in The Problem of Susan, she has lost every single member of her family in a single event.

(On balance I think Susan's reaction to their time in Narnia, during which they all grew to adulthood and became greatly respected, seems by far the most comprehensible: her efforts with lipstick and nylons should be seen as an attempt to recapture what she had in Narnia where she was adored by all, and her dismissal of it as a childhood fantasy is simply an attempt to deny the pain that reminiscing about the happiest time of her life is likely to bring. If anything it's the others who are odd; continuing to live their humdrum lives as schoolchildren in England as if nothing has happened and they haven't been changed in the slightest — something Randall Munroe seems to understand perfectly)

And that's just scratching the surface. Definitely not my favourite book, but thanks to my seriously low expectations I enjoyed it more than I expected.